The poor video quality version of the full presentation I linked to above is now available in three segments on Vimeo in HD and can be seen as Part 1, Part 2 - M9 and Part 3 - X1 and S2. There should be a Part 4 somewhere as well, which is the "Seal" segment, but it appears not to have been uploaded yet.

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and another Luminous Landscape sourced video is an interview with Leica's Stephan Daniel about the M9 made some weeks before the official release. The video runs to over an hour in length and can be viewed here. Some interesting factoids:

Leica make around 10, 000 to 12,000 M-bodies (includes film) a year.

Send your camera in for service and the whole camera, not just the repair, is warranted for a year.

Leica may be working on a zoom lens.

The next digital M may move to CMOS and incorporate Live View (or it may not!).

If I stopped smoking 40 cigarettes a day I could probably save enough to afford an M10 by the time it's released (UK prices). Of course I'd have to start smoking so I could stop and save the money but smoking kills which rather defeats the object. Drat.

...If the M8 drops down enough, I might get one to play with, but that's probably still a long way away...

How about using Leica's M lenses on a micro four-thirds body as an interim measure? Not rangefinders, of course and they have a crop factor of 2 rather than 1.3 but they do offer other bells and whistles in compensation. My thread Using Leica M lenses on micro four-thirds bodies refers.

There's another M9 preview available from Focus Numérique which you can read here (Googlish). As expected the high ISO IQ leaves something to be desired, IMHO.

Update: There's a review of the CameraQuest Leica M to Micro 4/3 Lens Adaptor here on the Luminous Landscape site. A Panasonic G1 was paired with a Leica Summilux f/1.4. The review's conclusions might be a surprise.

Guy Mancuso has penned some thoughts about the M9 as a series of posts on the thread here and also provided a couple of links to videos. Very usefully he has also made more than a few DNG (RAW) files available for download here. Each file runs to 35MB but can be opened in Adobe without problems so you can do your own post-processing and check out the IQ. Enjoy.

Update: There's a PDF document, authored in 2002 and available from the Leica web-site, entitled "Leica M-Lenses - Their Soul and Secrets" available here. I mention it because it's not given a lot of prominence on the web-site but it does provide a nice description of a number of lenses as well as the MTF graphs already available in the individual data sheets.

Just a quick post to point to the latest M9 "field review" from Michael Reichmann at Luminous Landscapes. He doesn't gloss over the bad points though he admits right from the start to being "a huge fan of M series Leica cameras". Enjoy.

Ah: "...you can have the camera automatically determine the minimum shutter speed to be used based on the lens mounted." Meaning based on the focal length of the lens the camera determines the lowest shutter speed for auto-ISO. Great! Why had Nikon not come up with this - and I s'pose Canon or Sony can't do it either